Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story

Wanna see Lance Armstrong get eviscerated for 90 minutes? Well, here's your movie! This movie tells the story of Armstrong's career while also telling the story of his PED usage in parallel. There are interviews with Greg LeMond, Betsy & Frankie Andreu, and several others - all of them just shredding Armstrong. The depth and breadth of the manner in which his legend is torn down is pretty amazing. There's also some stuff in here on the media and its canonization of Armstrong as well as plenty of stuff on Lance's (in)famous vindictiveness towards those he believes wronged him. I mean, we're talking about a guy who sued people for defamation for saying he was using PEDs - while he was using PEDs. Amazing. Anyway, on the whole, there's not a ton of new stuff here since we all know the Lance story already, but it's still very good. 8/10.

I Am Street Fighter

Originally produced as a pack-in for the 25th Anniversary Street Fighter package, Capcom eventually released this doc as a freebie into the wild. This generally focuses on the players and tournaments for SF, rather than the games themselves. Obviously, there's a lot on the games but that's not the focus. And that's OK. What's here is very good and interesting. Profiles of several top players, tournament directors, and so on. There's a lot of stuff with one hardcore SF-related collector. And there's lots of discussion on USA vs Japan as far as skills and why things are what they are (fewer arcades in the US = less in-person competition and, thus, lower skills, etc). All in all, I liked this one a lot. I like the SF games and have played just about all of them. If you're a fan, you'll like this. 8/10.

Unbreakable

Bruce Willis is David Dunn, a security guard. Samuel L Jackson is Elijah Price, the owner of an art gallery that exclusively sells comic book art. They meet and become friends when Willis is involved in a train derailment that kills every passenger onboard - except him. And he walks away completely uninjured. Price hears about him and contacts Dunn, letting him know that he thinks Dunn is some kind of comic book hero brought to life. Slowly, this idea takes hold in Dunn as well and we see him destroying his bench press personal best, learning of his powers of detection and so on. This is an M. Night Shamalamadingdong movie from back when M. Night was still making good stuff. This isn't on the level of The Sixth Sense but is still very good. Of course there's a twist, as well. And, yeah, there's some ridiculous moments, in particular a scene with Dunn's kid, but this is generally really good. And, hey, it's got Robin Wright, too. 7/10.

Life Itself

Also the name of his autobiography, Life Itself is a documentary chronicling the life and career (and, ultimately, the death) of film critic Roger Ebert. This is at once an interesting, funny, moving, slightly disturbing, and flawed documentary. On the one hand, it does a terrific job of capturing Ebert's early career and his rise as a partner with Gene Siskel. And we get some fun outtakes, some of which I'd seen before. And there's a nice interview with Gene's widow. And we get lots of footage of Ebert as well as he undergoes treatment with his wife Chaz by his side. That's where the slightly disturbing part comes in - Ebert's cancer treatment included the removal of his lower jaw. He's left with, well, the skin from his chin hanging down, making it so you can look through his mouth and see his neck. That's a bit unsettling. Through it all, Ebert maintains a mostly good attitude, staying funny, communicating via his trusty Macbook. He keeps busy, writing a lot and still watching movies. Unfortunately, he declined faster than expected and so the director was left finishing sooner than he wanted, at least as far as Ebert footage is concerned. And there's where the "flawed" aspect of the movie comes in. They left out an entire segment of Ebert's career - his partnership with Richard Roeper, which lasted nearly a decade - entirely, a terrible oversight that wounded Roeper personally. And they never directly get Ebert's final opinion on Siskel. They were enemies at first and that shifted over time but even Gene's widow isn't sure 100% certain of how they felt about each other. The director spent plenty of time with Ebert to get a full answer from him on this topic but never does. An interesting, if sad, side story is that Siskel never told Ebert he was sick with his brain tumor before passing. Roger was deeply wounded by that and he vowed to make his own illness known so that people wouldn't feel hurt by not knowing. Anyway, this was very good. 8/10.

Atari: Game Over

Were there really millions of Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried in a New Mexico landfill? This documentary seeks to answer that question. It also brings together the guy who developed E.T. (Howard Warshaw) and a few execs from Atari. So we kind of weave together three stories - the rise & fall of Atari, the career of Warshaw (the only dev at Atari whose every game was a million seller), and the search for the cartridges. And the movie succeeds on all three fronts. The story is well told, it's coherent, it's detailed enough, and the parties are all interesting. And the stuff with the landfill is very interesting. This is a terrific documentary, the best video game doc I've seen in awhile. 9/10.

Occupy Unmasked

Documentary claiming to expose the true origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement that seemed to rise out of nowhere back in 2011. And, to some degree, it succeeds in that regard. There's some rather damning video and email information shown detailing how the media helped to, well, create the movement. Unfortunately, that kind of hard-hitting actual investigative stuff is a small portion of the movie. The rest of the movie is more of a Breitbart and Brandon Darby hit piece akin to Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments where they show Occupy protesters that are clueless to the movement itself. They also spend a fair amount of time talking about rapes & sexual assaults at the various Occupy sites. And then there's a long diversion into a tangent somehow trying to link murders of Cambodians post-Vietnam to the Occupy movement that is just truly bizarre. Mostly, though, the movie is a lot of Breitbart ranting intermixed with clips of Occupy protesters swearing at cops or looting. In the end, this is not really a quality documentary but there IS some good stuff to be seen here. It's just lost in a mess of other nonsense. 4/10.

Bloodline

Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is John Rayburn, the #1 (but not oldest) son of the Rayburn clan. Linda "Good God, I was annoying on ER" Cardellini is Meg, his sister. They have two brothers, Danny and Kevin. The show is set in south Florida, with the Rayburns being the wealthy owners of some kind of resort hotel down there. On the surface, they're the All-American family. But things are not quite what they seem. "We're not bad people. We just did a bad thing", John says. And the show spends just about all of the 13 episodes of season 1 getting around to that bad thing. This is a reaaaaaaaaaaallllly slooooooooow burn of a show. Lots and lots and lots of build. Lots of hint at past issues in the family that are sloooooowly revealed. Lots of meaningful glances, sentences with double meanings and so on. That's mixed with a sometimes confusing structure that mixes dreams, flashbacks, looks forward, and so on in a way that sometimes isn't real clear. And all of that adds up to a show that might just lose a lot of its audience along the way. The pacing is pretty glacial but it does pay off eventually (you can argue whether that payoff is worth it or not). The cast, which also includes Sissy Spacek as the Rayburn mom and MTV alum Jacinda Barrett as John's wife, is stellar. I was entertained but this isn't quite the home run I'd hoped for. And the big reveal at the end of season 1 to set up season 2 was pretty laughably obvious, which was a letdown. Still, I liked it and I want another season. 7/10.